Four English Poetry and Song Society Recordings

The EPSS has supported the long and vibrant tradition of English art-song for many years.

These EPSS recordings were made on portable recording equipment and with less than ideal microphone placement and are not to our usual modern standard. However, they contain fine performances and many very unfamiliar and exquisite songs, which will delight any lover of late-Romantic vocal music

Here we have fine settings of Thomas Hardy and the dialect poems of William Barnes from Gerald Finzi, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Somervell, Clive Carey, Roger Lord, Alison Edgar, Judith Bailey and Brian Daubney. Works by the five finalists in the EPSS competition of 2001 are also included.

Some of the best known and most moving of English poetry came from the horrors of the 1914-8 war. Here texts by Siegried Sassoon, A.E. Housman, Rupert Brooke, F.W. Harvey and more in settings by Ivor Gurney, Geraint Lewis, John Ireland, Geoffrey Kimpton, Margaret Wegener, John R. Williamson, Duncan Reid, Dennis Wickens, Elaine Hugh-Jones and Jerome Kern. Works by the seven finalists in the 2004 EPSS competition are included.